THE DOOR TO Kim’s bedroom is sealed like a crime scene. Yellow police tape, which I got for her from the station when we were in middle school, covers the door in a big X from corner to corner. The words DO NOT CROSS repeat themselves against the wood. A warning. One that I’m almost tempted to heed. A cowardly part of me wants to run back down the steps and out the Dowds’ front door and not stop until I am home.
Beside me, Sonya shudders. She reaches out, brushes her fingertips against the tape. It’s old and filthy, and her fingers come away with a gray coating of dust. It’s as if Kimberly hasn’t been back here in years.
“They really don’t know how to clean, do they?” Sonya whispers through the corner of her mouth.
That forces a surprised laugh out of me. “Not even a little bit.” I almost snort.
She sighs dramatically. “Writers.” Then she places her hand on the knob, without bothering to wipe off the dust, and turns it.
Kimberly’s room is one of the few places we’ve rarely visited as a group; Sonya’s house is our usual hangout spot. We’ve been in Kimberly’s house hundreds of times—in the living room, in the dining room, out back, pretending to be volcanoes in the mounds of crackly leaves that fall from the big oak tree every autumn. But we hardly ever migrate up to the sanctum of her bedroom. Standing here now, it feels almost like a holy place—the room bathed in dim pink light coming in through the sheer curtains; her bed a disastrous knot of sheets and blankets and old, ratty stuffed animals; one wall lined with bookshelves, crammed with cracked, broken spines, some of the books read and reread so many times the titles and authors aren’t even legible anymore.
It’s an almost-perfect representation of who Kimberly is—spunky, feminine, poetic.
And closed off, I think. A lot like her best friend.
I glance at Sonya. Her head is tilted back, the magenta sunlight glowing in red streamers through her hair. Her lips are parted, eyes kind of wide and stunned. She looks the way I feel—as if we’re standing in the rainbow mosaic of stained-glass windows in an old stone church. We’re invaders of the worst kind. We definitely shouldn’t be in here.
And yet.
“Do we even know what we’re looking for?” I ask. I do one sweep of the room, then another, hoping that my eyes will catch on something that stands out, something that doesn’t make sense, something that isn’t fundamentally Kimberly. But it’s all here: the books, the mess, the silence. Even the pack of Big Red chewing gum on her nightstand—her breath always smells like cinnamon.
“No idea,” Sonya says. “Something … totally bizarre? Something that’s definitely not any of this stuff.” She casts a long gaze around, her neck stretched as if she’s trying to see up on top of the shelves, looking for something that might be hidden there. All I see are old board games—Operation, Pictionary, Ghost Castle—in a haphazard stack.
I step sideways, meaning to slip between Sonya and the mussed bed to the other side of the room—not that I’m eager to come farther into a place that feels, for reasons I can’t explain, like it doesn’t want us here. But as I move behind Sonya, she steps backward, right into me, and we almost topple together onto the bed. I grab her shoulders and plant my feet like I’m about to be tackled on the football field, and we manage to stay upright. We’re close, though. Close enough that I can smell the fruity, flowery fragrance of her shampoo, can see the gentle slope of her neck down to her shoulder.
Before I have time to even process any of that, I realize that my hands are still on her shoulders, and so does she. She jerks away from me, shimmies past, back to the doorway, as if her first instinct was to run away.
“Oh, god … uh … I’m sorry,” I say, drooping my head, trying to shrink down into myself, roll up like an armadillo and hide.
“It’s fine,” she says, hugging herself. Putting up her defenses. Sending the same message she’s been sending for months, the one that I’ve been choosing to ignore.
I sit on the edge of the bed. The metal frame cries out a rusty screech.
“Gabe—” she starts.
“Please don’t.” I cut her off, staring into the palms of my hands, still scraped in places from Dagger Hill. My shoulder still hurts, but it’s dull compared with the agony I feel in my chest. I shouldn’t even be worrying about this. We told Mrs. Dowd the only important thing right now is finding Kimberly, which is true.
And yet.
“I get it,” I continue. “You’ve been shutting me out for almost a year. It’s not like I haven’t noticed. I just … I guess I was still hoping that … that maybe there was something there. I … I get it, Sone.”
“No,” she says. She’s squeezing herself even tighter now. “Gabe, you really don’t get it.”
“What is there not to get? I keep putting myself out there, and you keep shutting me down. I thought … at the winter formal, when we danced…” I close my eyes and pictures of that night swim up out of the darkness. The icicle lights dangling from the ceiling of the school gym, the bleachers draped in blue and white tissue paper streamers. Mannheim Steamroller’s version of “Little Drummer Boy” playing through the PA system because the school can’t afford decent speakers.
The four of us were sitting at a table, Charlie making eyes at Elizabeth Williamson across the room, Sonya and Kimberly sitting close so they could hear each other talking. And me, on the other side of the table, feeling a silk ribbon cinch tight around my heart every time Sonya smiled or laughed or glanced at me. School was out for the holidays, and we were full of nervous excitement for whatever the night had in store and for the days after, when we’d be huddled together in one of our houses, watching movies, reading comic books, playing Nintendo. I asked Sonya to dance, and she didn’t hesitate, just took my hand and led me out to the dance floor, where we swayed together while Chip Davis sang, “Pa-rum pum pum pum.”
“Gabe, the four of us went to that as friends, remember?” Sonya says, bringing me back to the lightless heat of now. “We were just having a good time.” She says that last part so quietly that I almost can’t hear her. She’s hurting, but I can’t help myself.
“But I felt something,” I say. “I felt it then, and I feel it now. And I know you do, too. I can see it.”
She’s quiet for a moment before she says, “I don’t know what you think you see, but you’re right. I do feel something.”
I look up at her, my throat tight with a hope that I haven’t felt since that night in December. But then I see Sonya staring down at the Big Red gum on Kimberly’s nightstand. She picks it up, holds it to her nose, inhales deeply. And even though there are tears leaking from the corners of her eyes, she smiles. Tiny and sweet and all to herself. The last of that hope dies in me then, and the hairline fractures that have been forming across the surface of my heart all year finally split, opening wide.
“I feel all the same things you feel,” Sonya says, looking at me with such bravery that it makes me feel awful and proud at the same time. “I just don’t feel them … for you.”
The weight of her words pulls my shoulders down. My body feels like it’s full of sand. But there’s also a strange lightness forming in my chest, something bright and, somehow, happy. Something that I can’t describe and don’t fully understand yet.
I see the winter formal again. Sonya and Kimberly, leaning in to each other, smiling. For the first time, I really register the look that Sonya is giving Kimberly. It’s the same look I was giving Sonya all night.
“Oh my god,” I whisper. I look at her, and I see her, really see her. That lightness inside me, I realize, is the sense that I’ve been needlessly forcing myself into these tense, awkward situations for months, dragging Sonya into them with me. I’ve been letting myself down and taking it out on her. And all this time if I’d just opened my eyes … “Sonya, I don’t know what to say.”
She comes over, sits down on the bed next to me. The frame squeals again, and we both cringe. “You don’t have to say anything,” she says. “Just be there for me, okay? Be my friend, no matter what.”
“But how can I do that when … when I’m in love with you?” I say, knowing it sounds pathetic, knowing that those feelings are already collapsing, to be replaced by a whole slew of other emotions—sadness, embarrassment, joy.
Sonya sighs. “You’re not in love with me, Gabe. You’re in love with … I don’t know … with the idea of being in love with me, I guess. You’re the same as I am. Stuck in this town, waiting to graduate so you can move on to the parts of your life that feel like they’re really happening.” Her eyes shift to the window. The coming night has almost completely swallowed the light outside. “Windale, everything and everybody here … it’s just a fantasy.”
I try to hold the tremor in my voice still and keep the tears behind my eyes. “But what about this?” Gesturing wildly around me, trying to make her understand. “What about the four of us? You guys are … everything to me. Is that a fantasy, too?”
She thinks about it, chewing her lip. “I don’t know. Maybe. I hope not.”
We’re quiet for a while, staring at the shadows of our feet on the tan carpet. I heave a long, heavy sigh. I’ve been tying myself into knots about this for months, and finally I begin to feel those tangles unclench.
“You know, I would have stood outside your house with a boom box over my head,” I say. And, thank god, she laughs.
She puts her hand in mine, drops her head to my shoulder, giggling. “I know, buddy. I know.”
I don’t think there’s anything left to say, so we just sit there in the dreary dark. My eyes circle the room again, still searching for whatever it was we came here to find. I let my gaze linger on the spot where Kimberly’s chewing gum was, the gum that’s now closed in Sonya’s hand. It was resting on top of a book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. A strange book for Kim. Her tastes usually lie in the complex, meaty volumes of old literary fiction, not in children’s fantasies. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen her without a book somewhere on her person—eventually, the options have to become limited, don’t they?
It’s not just the book I’m interested in, though. There’s something tucked into its pages, pushing the paperback cover into an arching bulge. I can just make out the shape of it.
“What is that?” I ask to no one in particular. I lean across Sonya and flick the bedside lamp on, then grab the book off the nightstand.
“That’s a book, Gabe,” Sonya says. “I know you don’t read much, but you should at least recognize one when you see it.”
I shoot her a look, and she shrugs, grinning. I flip the book open to the place where there’s a thick piece of paper stuck between the pages—about a third of the way in. It doesn’t look like it was put in any particular place, just slipped inside the book in a hurry, maybe as Kimberly was heading out the door Friday morning. The card stock, or whatever it is, is folded into quarters. As I pull it open, Sonya leans in to see.
It’s a drawing, done in big, sweeping strokes with a thick black marker. Kimberly has dabbled in art before, impressionist paintings that Charlie and I have to turn our heads in every direction to even begin to understand what they’re supposed to look like, but this is something different. The sight of it sends a cold droplet racing down my spine.
Dagger Hill is on the page in front of us, a startlingly perfect copy of the trees and bushes and the boulder. The one that was once a make-believe pirate ship and the place where Charlie bound the four of us Almost Nobodies together with a promise. He’s in the picture, too. Along with me and Sonya and Kimberly. But we’re dead. Strewn around the boulder, our bodies mangled, black spatters that I’m sure are meant to look like blood painting the rounded face of the boulder. In the image, Charlie is lying on top of the rock, one arm dangling, his lower half gone entirely. I look into my own open eyes and wonder what my last thought was in this version of history, Kimberly’s nightmare.
“What does it mean?” Sonya murmurs, taking the paper and holding it close to her face, as if testing to see if it’s real.
“I don’t know,” I say. My voice is a frail whisper. “She must have drawn this before the plane crash.”
All my notions about the plane crash—how it happened, why it happened—and Kimberly’s being taken simply by chance disintegrate into nothing. Higgins and TerraCorp may have made a lot of mistakes that helped cause the plane to end up where it did, but it wasn’t just a random, freak accident. Kimberly knew something the rest of us didn’t. Maybe she even would have recognized the Bug Man if she’d been conscious. Maybe the Bug Man recognized her.
“We need to get to the diner,” I say, standing. I toss the Narnia book back onto Kimberly’s nightstand, glad to finally be leaving this place. “See if Charlie found anything out.”
Sonya nods. “Okay. But first we have to make a stop.”
“Where?”
“The Banshee Palace,” she says.
“You really want to go there? After everything you saw?” I can’t imagine what that nightmare was like—if it was a nightmare at all—but I know I wouldn’t want to visit room 6 if it was me.
She shrugs. “Not really. But Kimberly could actually be there. I don’t know why Mrs. Rapaport would have shown it to me if it wasn’t important.”
“I don’t know, Sone…”
“Let’s just check it off the list, okay? Please?”
I take a few seconds to think it over, staring down at Kimberly’s drawing, the nape of my neck tingling. “Okay,” I say.
We hurry through the bedroom door and down the stairs. Mrs. Dowd is in the kitchen, fiddling with a cantaloupe. She might be trying to cut it open, but she has no knife.
“Find anything?” she calls to us.
I open my mouth to say yes, but Sonya beats me to the punch.
“Nothing that stands out,” she calls back to Kim’s mom. “Sorry, Mrs. Dowd. We’ll keep you posted, though, okay?”
Mrs. Dowd only nods, staring sadly down at her melon. With that, Sonya and I slip out into a humid summer evening. I look across the walkway to the road and halt in my tracks. Sonya walks right into my back and half trips around me.
“What the hell, Gabe?” she says. But then she sees what I see.
Parked against the sidewalk is the Crown Victoria patrol car I’d recognize anywhere. The bubble lights are dark, the word CHIEF printed in large, faded letters across the side. My dad is leaning against the passenger door, legs stretched out in front of him, arms crossed, examining his nails. His eyes flip up and catch onto mine, like fishhooks. And he’s about to reel me in.
“Change of plans,” I say.